Digital fringe projection system for round shaped breast tumor detection

The digital fringe projection has been widely used in the field of surface imaging however its application in the field of body imaging especially for human breasts is still quite limited. Currently, the common imaging modality for breast tumor diagnoses are breast ultrasound and mammogram. There are advantages and limitations of using the mammogram and ultrasound in terms of the procedure of the process and the non-invasive nature of the procedure. In this work, an automated digital fringe projection system is developed to execute the imaging of surface changes of a helical shaped phantom breast. The fringe projection setup utilizes a computer, LCD projector, and a CCD camera. The tumor used was round-shaped with a diameter size of 1.5 and 2 cm. The fringe pattern was projected through the three-step phase shift where a resulting phase map was obtained. Results demonstrated that the system was able to identify an average pixel shift of five and ten on the breast surface caused by the presence of the round breast tumors.